All Things IT Blog » Drivers http://www.enusbaum.com/blog My little nerded out corner of the Internets! Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:22:58 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 How to install a Linksys WMP54G in Windows Vista http://www.enusbaum.com/blog/2007/06/how-to-install-a-linksys-wmp54g-in-windows-vista/ http://www.enusbaum.com/blog/2007/06/how-to-install-a-linksys-wmp54g-in-windows-vista/#comments Tue, 19 Jun 2007 04:10:51 +0000 eric http://www.enusbaum.com/blog/2007/06/18/how-to-install-a-linksys-wmp54g-in-windows-vista/ Recently I moved my computer upstairs to make room in the downstairs office. I decided to just install a spare Linksys WMP54G PCI Wireless card that I had laying around in my “bin o’ hardware”. This was a fairly new card, as the hardware revision of it was v4.0 and the latest listed on Linksys.com was v4.1. I was running Windows Vista Ultimate so I figured Vista would have no problem auto-detecting and installing the card.
I downloaded and installed the only drivers Linksys had listed on their site for this card. It seemed to work, but not well. I couldn’t detect the SSID of my wireless network and even when I tried to manually configure it, the card would still refuse to connect. I did some research and it seems that only the WMP54G v4.1 has a Vista Certified driver from Linksys and it would not work with the v4.0 hardware. On the Linksys Vista Support page, I noticed this text at the bottom:

*If your Linksys product does not appear on any of these three lists, there is no plan to support the product with Windows Vista.

Thanks for the proverbial “dick in the ass” Linksys! Your ability to bend your customers over and give it to them hard never, ever ceases to amaze me.
After some frustrated Googling I found a couple blog entries that described the best way to install the drivers for this card: Let Windows search for an appropriate driver automatically and download it from Windows Update.

The only way I was able to do this was to put my computer back on the LAN by running a very, very long Ethernet cable to the closest access point. Once my machine was online wired, I went into the device manager and selected “Uninstall Device” and also checked the “Delete Drivers for this Device“, which would force Windows Vista to search for new drivers and allow it to search Windows Update.

It seems that even though Linksys refuses to release a Windows Driver for the v4.0 hardware of the WMP54G Wireless PCI Card, at least Microsoft realized that PERHAPS they should provide the drivers for a fairly common Wireless Card that many of their users may still be using.

Big Thanks to Microsoft! A Big “Get Bent” to Linksys!

Cheers!

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